


Fireman's Carry

by orphan_account



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Flashfire - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 02:35:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6266170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The runner must have heard his muffled shout and whipped around to stare for what could have only been half a second with wide, terrified eyes.</p><p>And then a rifle shot split the air with a crack like thunder, and Pyro’s entire world seemed to collapse with Scout.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fireman's Carry

**Author's Note:**

> My half of the art trade with the wonderfully skilled Shadowenza over on Tumblr. Frankly this got a little out of hand and uh... wound up being a little (a lot) longer than I'd anticipated it would be initially. Woops.
> 
> My Tumblr: http://charspurpletooran.tumblr.com/

Three days.        

Miss Pauling had warned them through the busted up old radio in Sniper’s van, to be ready in three days for the fight of their lives, her voice clipped, rushed and clearly dishevelled as she herself fled the encroaching wrath of Grey Mann. Three long days of nervous energy, left unchecked and crackling through all nine RED’s confined to the small Teufort base; they all knew, that when the fight did eventually come to their doorstep, that it could very well be the last time they saw each other alive.

Death was an inevitability after the Respawn system had been sabotaged. The BLU team could attest to that.

They had three days.

Yet no one had been prepared for when they were attacked that night.

Pyro had been on red alert, not completely understanding how and why everyone could possibly be so calm after Pauling’s frantic message. He knew Grey Mann had Spybots, along with the rest of his team, so what was stopping him from sending in a small group of them in to pick them off like flies?

He was, if he could help it.

Pyro patrolled the halls of the base, every fibre of his being taut with anticipation. The increasing paranoia of whirring gears and distorted chuckles plagued him, and it was that fear that had Pyro engulfing an entire hall in a swath of purging fire. The burning arc crackled into the air, the smell of butane filtering into his mask a small comfort to the otherwise antsy mercenary, who was _positive_ he’d heard something lurking in the shadows beneath Teufort.

The flames parted, and Pyro startled at a gentle touch to his shoulder, whipping around with his finger itching on the repurposed gas pump of his flamethrower. Scout stared at him with wide eyes, his arms thrown up in surrender.

“Woah woah easy Py! Christ, I don’t want no third degree burns before I gotta run around aiight?” Pyro cocked his head to the side; wasn’t Scout up in the rec-room? His fingers twitched over the trigger.

“Prove it”

“What?”

“Prove you’re Scout”

“Py, I can’t understand a word you’re sayin’ right now” with a frustrated sigh, rubber-clad fingers fumbled with the clasp on his respirator, clicking it open with the heavy weight of his flamethrower in his other hand.

“Prove to me you’re Scout” The runner stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

“What? Why?”

The flamethrower was shifted upward in an effortless arc, the burning pilot light flickering when it came to level out with Scout’s face. Blue eyes went comically wide.

“Holy crap! Okay, okay! God what the hell has you so on edge anyway? I ain’t ever seen you like this” was he just avoiding the question? It seemed that way to Pyro, but he decided to give the runner the benefit of doubt and lowered his heavy weapon.

“Spies” and just like that, Pyro could see it click and Scout’s jaw dropped open with a soundless pop.

“You’ve been spy checkin’ this entire time..?”

Pyro nodded.

“I don’t want anyone to die” he murmured, his voice quiet.

“Well-”

A thunderous boom rattled the downstairs halls, the close by explosion shaking the very foundation of the RED base and sending both Scout and Pyro to the floor with barks of alarm. Heavy’s voice echoed down into the underground portion of the base, and Pyro’s blood froze:

“Metal men are here!”

Casting Scout a cursory glance, a tension crawled up Pyro’s spine that had him grappling for his footing and his flamethrower. Blue sparks flickered from what he recognized easily as a faulting disguise, and with the nozzle of his weapon facing the still-recovering Spy, Pyro pulled the gas pump. The Scout disguise melted away with the wires and scorched paint, the robot’s mechanical voice crackling and warbling under the intense heat of a point-blank gullet of butane-fuelled fire.

He didn’t hear the second Spy until pain exploded from his shoulder, the subtlety of its approach thrown to the wind the second the knife punctured a hole in his suit. Pyro roared, kicking a leg back with a snarl on his lips at the whirring gears trying to hold the robot’s ground, and with a well-placed elbow, Pyro knocked the bot back far enough for him to wheel around and shoot a jet of compressed air from the nozzle of his flamethrower.

The robot hit the wall with a dull smack and Pyro’s fingers curled around the gas pump.

Nothing.

Blinking, he tried again

The hiss of compressed gas reached his ears, and Pyro lifted his flamethrower only to find a clean cut through the otherwise intact hose. The pilot light flickered out of existence.

Uh oh.

He dropped the flamethrower with a metallic clang and pulled his shotgun from his back, unloading a clip into the robot clawing its way up off the floor. Black oil pooled across the white tile and Pyro’s back twinged uncomfortably when he finally let the tension roil out of his shoulders; the knife was still there, wasn’t it? Reaching around blindly, Pyro gingerly pulled the cold balisong from his shoulder with a breath sucked in between teeth. It clattered into the black oil, and he clicked his respirator closed with a drawn out sigh, mourning the loss of his flamethrower.

Maybe Engineer had some spare hosing he could borrow.

And by borrow he meant steal.

Staring at the fading blue-glowing eyes of the Spybot, Pyro cocked his head consideringly. They were machines. How was it they knew – or rather Grey Mann knew – that he and Scout were close enough to approach each other like that? And why wasn’t he stabbed straight from the get-go? He had his back to it, so why…

Frankly, it probably would have been better had he not thought it over.

Mann had no idea of their relationship, nor how close he and Scout were initially. The robot itself was a test, and he’d just passed the damn thing with flying colours.

“Shit!”

Pyro snatched the sturdy piping of his flamethrower and sidestepped the pool of oil, sprinting up the stairs as fast as his injured shoulder allowed him. Scout, he had to find Scout.

Sniper was in the thick of it with his rifle, ducking in an out from behind the wall to fire off impressive shots that struck down robots with crackling force; huh, it looked like Engineer had finished those explosive rounds for him. Engineer himself had a level three Sentry wrangled on the ramparts and was giving Sniper the cover he needed while Heavy and Medic roared down the dirt-trodden hall, pushing the machines back.

Explosions rung out from across the sniper deck, and Pyro – completely forgetting about hosing – ran past Engineer to go see what sort of havoc Soldier and Demoman were causing. It came as no surprise that they were quite literally doing bombing runs over at the ruined BLU base, the shrapnel and debris flying around not seeming to faze either of the mercenaries.

Pyro finally spotted Scout in the fray, his bat stained black with oil and his scattergun nowhere to be seen; he looked frantic, desperately batting down swarming Scoutbots with teeth bared like a cornered animal on its last legs.

“Scout!”

Through the chaotic firefight, the runner must have heard his muffled shout and whipped around to stare for what could have only been half a second with wide, terrified eyes.

And then a rifle shot split the air with a crack like thunder, and Pyro’s entire world seemed to collapse with Scout. Belatedly, he realised he was screaming and couldn’t seem to stop; It was a broken, mournful sound that cut through the hail of gunfire like a knife, a sound so foreign to himself that it took a familiar hand clapping down on his shoulder for Pyro’s vocal distress to quieten to a muffled keen.

Clover smoke wafted into his mask, and Spy’s low murmur pulled Pyro from his lapse into despair.

“Bring him back to us”

He didn’t need to be told twice.

The robots abandoned the gunned down Scout and wheeled around to swarm him instead. Spy was gone as fast as he appeared, shimming through reality in flickers of red and leaving Pyro to the horde of Scoutbots. Frankly, he wouldn’t have it any other way. Flamethrower broken and abandoned, he pulled his fire axe from his back and swung it around in a devastating, two-handed arcs, cleaving robots in twain and seeming nonplussed by the spray back of thick black oil; these machines had no flesh to char beneath gullets of flame, no bones to turn to ash – but their blood? Their blood was as tangible as the real thing.

It was a violent ordeal, Pyro carving a path through robots in an almost deranged persistence, his axe an extension of his very being, delivering blow after blow that buckled, sliced and split the metal machines that dared step anywhere near him, that dared to get in his way. The pain lancing from his shoulder only seemed to heighten his fervour. Axe raised, and his weight thrown behind his swings, Pyro was forced to feint and lose control of the wild arc when sapping electricity jumped from one robot to another; Spy stared at him evenly with a cigarette perched between his lips, having appeared from thin air behind one of the robots with a balisong in hand.

“I will dispose of the rest, go”

Pyro dropped his axe to the sound of a knife slipping between armoured plates, sprinting and shouldering past the remaining Scoutbots without a second thought. He didn’t care, they were in the way, Spy could handle it.

Another rifle shot had him ducking out of reflex, only rising when he realised it was from his own Sniper, the Australian dispatching a machined one that fell with a loud metallic clang to the ground below.

And then there was Scout.

Twisted on the ground, looking worse for wear and blood streaming from his upper right arm. Blue eyes blinked up at him in a daze, and Pyro nearly fell to his knees in relief when he realised that Scout was okay. That he was alive. The runner smiled wryly, clutching his bleeding arm and huffing out a breath through his nose.

“Guess I’m just lucky, huh?”

To say he was expecting a blur of red rubber to lunge at him would be a lie; but damn could that guy move fast when he wanted to. Pyro scooped him up in his arms and cradled Scout in his lap, soft, whimpering sounds echoing from the inside of his mask. Scout stared up at him with unfocused eyes, both confused by the sudden urgency behind his shaking grip, and a little stunned by the soft sobs coming from him. Scout lifted his injured arm with a pained hiss, tapping a finger on the respirator.

“Py?” he questioned softly, not quite sure how to handle a shaking, blubbering mess of a pyromaniac. Pyro nodded, and Scout flicked the front of the mask open.

“I-I thought… I thought you were dead” was all that came from the mask, voice quiet and unsure “I… I t-thought-”

“Hey hey easy there, I’m here, aiight?” Scout slung his good arm around the back of Pyro’s shoulders reassuringly, pressing his face to his chest with a shaky sigh “No way can you get rid of me that easily, hate to say it pallie but you’re stuck with me, y’hear?”

Pyro snorted through the mask, and pressed it atop the runner’s head, making quite noise of affirmation and pulled Scout all the closer.

Medic wasn’t far behind Pyro’s rampage and Spy’s clean-up, taking a moment to assess Scout’s injuries and patch him up under Sniper’s watchful eyes. Pyro had been quick to escape the frontlines with the runner in tow, hoisting him up bridal style and trying to contain the little flutter his heart gave out when Scout’s hand pressed over it.

Behind the dark walls and out of plain sight, Pyro allowed himself to curl into the accommodating runner, holding him protectively in shaking arms.

Scout said nothing, but he didn’t need to.

He was puffing warm breaths across Pyro’s neck. He was breathing. He was alive.

 

 


End file.
